Recent events have been littered with reports of systematic attacks on public or private IT structures. According to the victims, these cyber offensives, aimed at spying on or crippling the targeted systems, are the work of professionals more or less encouraged by States in rivalry with other States. The absence of physical confrontation or pyrotechnic conflagrations could lead one to believe that this is just a game played by children looking for mischief. This is not the case, especially when it comes to shutting down the computer systems of major hospitals, putting the lives of thousands of patients at risk.

In fact, cyber-attacks are part of a cycle of power struggles who’s sometimes muted violence is economically devastating and humanly deadly. The bitterness of the struggle will have led the protagonists to appeal to the cyber patriotism of their citizens, just as others before them have called on their people to take up arms against invaders.

So far, the cyber war that has been unleashed can be summed up as an arms race that mainly affects the security, military, industrial, economic and scientific systems of the major powers, but does not spare the less advanced nations in all these fields. The ultimate aim of this multisectoral and multidirectional offensive is the quest for global hegemony, which necessarily involves the standardisation of linguistic and monetary practices, the undermining of intellectual perspectives and the eradication of the cultural foundations specific to each people.

For peoples like ours, who are already victims of fragmentation manoeuvres, the eradication of civilisational references will be followed by a depersonalisation that will favour the acceptance of new forms of subjugation. It must be said that the steamroller is already in motion. It manifests itself on the one hand in the promotion of a social organisation emptied of the moral standards that were once generally accepted, and on the other hand, in a plethora of scandalous constructions of supposedly progressive amoralism.

For example, the same people who condemn polygamy and consider marriage at 16 to be premature are promoting the legitimisation of the supposed sexual consent of children as young as 9. The same people who pose as defenders of human rights, especially children’s rights, are also campaigning to make abortion commonplace, as if the suppression of life in the womb were a simple act of bodily hygiene.

On a daily basis we are paying the price for this other world war, which, like the previous ones that came from elsewhere, will not benefit us. On the contrary, every particle of energy we devote to it, on whatever side, will contribute to the erosion of our potential for survival as an integral part of humanity and as a sovereign people. The faceless war that is being proposed to us feeds on our lifeblood, and only a wall without cracks can prevent it from committing in our midst the carnage programmed by others.

In any case, the great peoples of tomorrow will be those who, today, have been able to unite all their forces in order to preserve all their areas of development. For the sons and daughters of Cameroon that we are, it is therefore essential to temper our tribal impulses, to erase our ideological differences, to rediscover a sense of togetherness, a common stance and common aspirations.

From now on, it is up to us to move from a relationship based on force or violence to one based on brotherhood, awareness, intelligence and the mobilisation of citizens and patriots. We can do it, and our country deserves it!!!